Crowdsource your brand building

Imagine having 100s and 1000s of brand promoters instead of competent team of 5 to 10. Imagine the difference between the two, undoubtedly your competent team has very good understanding of promotion but at the same time engaging crowd for the same would not harm your interest in any ways. However, you may filter some innovative, effervescent, invigorating and path breaking brand building ideas from the crowd. Many of the companies have implemented this phenomenon while developing new products, brands like Amazon, Dell, Nokia, Nike and Adidas have successfully engaged crowd to customize their product and hugely benefitted out of it.
In the same manner online retailers can exploit crowdsourcing in building their brand. In India still uses of crowdsourcing in upscaling brand image is low but the rising of small and medium online retailers would definitely help to pick this trend up sooner than the later on online platform. Online retailers like Myntra, Inkfruit, 99labels and fashion and you are leveraging crowdsourcing whilst building their brand. Here are some reasons why small and medium online retailers are Crowdsourcing their brand building process in India:
• In developing economies like India the main concern for Small and medium online retailer is always revenues and hence brand takes the back seat.
• It is quite apparent that there is always a cost quality tussle which small and medium retailers find difficult to handle.
• Crowdsourcing as a model supports SME on the issue of finding the right design or solution at the cost which fits their pocket. In India there are quite a few companies have used crowdsourcing
• The platform is competitive subsequently price is sensitive. Besides this, the fact that online retailers can access brand promoters in Tier 2 and 3 cities the cost comes down significantly as compared to old brick and mortar model.

However, Crowdsourcing doesn’t bring automatic success for online retailers. Here are some of the aspects that need to look after while crowdsourcing your brand building:
• To successfully include crowd in this process, online retailers have to be to be actively involved in the online community.
• Whether it’s through moderating the crowdsourcing site or providing feedback on comments/ideas, online retailers need to give users a reason to participate.
• Crowdsourcing relies heavily on communication between the crowd and the online retailers, so timely feedback and answering questions is a must. When people get a response right away, it shows them that you’re listening.
Crowdsourcing provides online retailers with opportunity of reaching out to thousands of promoters hence it helps them to land up on something interesting, unique and innovative. There are various approaches that platforms have used, especially in brand work, like a contest model, curated crowdsourcing model, closed crowd model. In each of the three the common thing is the access to huge pool of promoters. In contest, as the name suggest client can do a onetime contest to generate options and select what he likes. Curated crowdsourcing is a phenomenon which is gaining lot of interest as it involves delivery assurance and human presence besides the platform interaction. Due to confidentiality issues, some time customers are happy to do a closed group crowd contest as well.
Flip side:
Online retailers have also to be cautioned if they are implementing crowd sourcing as a brand building technique for their business:
• The activity is mainly unorganized and time consuming.
• The crowd may not always be available to give their feedbacks
• Any sort of negative opinions may mar the image of their very purpose of interfacing.